Wasps and terrorists

Posted on October 4, 2018 by Victor Rosenthal

When I was a teenager in the 1950s, I was a science fiction nut. I would load myself down with books and short story anthologies from the library and even spend actual money on pulp magazines. There were a few writers that I adored and others that I hated. I didn’t like anything that had philosophical pretensions or plot uncertainties. I liked science that could be believed with only minimal suspension of belief, action, and writing that offered insight into individual and social human behavior, even when it was attributed to aliens. And there was one SF novel that I read when it came out in 1957 that absolutely knocked my socks off: Eric Frank Russell’s Wasp. It isn’t an exaggeration to say that I’ve recalled and thought about its content ever since, although for a long time I’d forgotten the name of the book or the author.

Russell (1905-1978) was a British writer, who during the war was either a lowly RAF radio operator or a super-secret military intelligence operative, depending on whom you ask. One way or the other, he well understood the potential of the combination of psychological warfare and carefully calibrated and targeted violence, as a way to leverage a very small investment in resources to hamstring an enemy with a large and powerful military, to soften it up and facilitate its defeat by a less powerful opponent.

The wasp that inspired the title was the small creature who flies into a moving vehicle and by stinging the driver causes a wreck in which several much larger and more powerful creatures are killed. The novel is set during a war between interstellar civilizations, one based on Earth and another in the Sirian system. An earthling named James Mowry who had grown up on a planet in the Sirian Empire and knew its language and culture, was trained, equipped and disguised to function as a saboteur, and planted on an enemy planet.

Mowry acted with great ingenuity to create a phony anti-war organization (the Sirian Freedom Party) and to give the impression that it was large and widespread (today this is called “astroturfing”). He did things like placing stickers with subversive slogans on the windows of stores and public buildings; the stickers were made with a corrosive ink such that even when they were scraped off the slogan would be etched into the glass, which created suspicions that the owners of the windows might be sympathetic to the organization. He paid thugs to assassinate a member of the secret police and mailed threats to numerous other officers, causing the agency to devote a great deal of resources into trying to track down the “members” of this group. At the same time, some of the general public bought into the antiwar, anti-regime message, and as a result the society was racked by uncertainty and division (is this starting to sound familiar?)

The planet Mowry was on was mostly water, and a large fleet of merchant ships was essential to its economy. Mowry released a fleet of tiny drone submarines which had no offensive capability, but appeared on radar as the periscope of a larger sub. He then exploded a mine on a ship to give the impression that it had been attacked by a submarine, causing the Sirians to think there was a large force of armed subs threatening their fleets, and requiring them to devote much energy to searching for something that didn’t exist.

Through various simple, cheap, extremely clever and effective actions, Mowry caused the authorities to divert large forces from the war effort, ultimately making it possible for a much weaker invading force to prevail.

In a very interesting thesis submitted to the US Naval Postgraduate School this year, Andrew J. Fox cites Wasp as a “prescient” account of doctrine, strategy, and tactics for an insurgency. He compares Mowry’s tactics to those of the relatively small PLO in the 1960s and 70s, when Arafat gained influence and, paradoxically, legitimacy, for his cause by attacking an essential transport network (airline hijackings) and by a high-profile murder (the Israeli athletes in Munich).

Fox notes that the Internet makes the kind of operations launched by Mowry even easier and cheaper. After all, he had to mail his threats to secret police officers! Fox is primarily interested in the potential for new strategies of terrorism and asymmetric warfare to arise, utilizing modern technology in novel ways. But I am struck by the potential that exists for psychological warfare in Mowry’s techniques – or rather, by the clear evidence that we, Israel and the West, are being actively targeted by Wasp-like tactics today.

Think about the consternation provoked by the tiny – in active members – organizations Jewish Voice for Peace and If Not Now. They claim many supporters, but are there more than a few dozens of active members? I strongly doubt it. Think about the political damage done in Israel by the left-wing NGOs that are paid by European governments to stir up trouble in the territories, to flood our legal system with complaints from Palestinians, to impeach the IDF, to spread demonizing and delegitimizing propaganda – the list is endless. And what does it cost them? A few million Euros a year, far less than it would cost to attack us with tanks or planes.

But there is no reason that such techniques can only be used by weak states and non-state actors. I would not be surprised to find out that Israel had released several “wasps” of its own against Iran and Hezbollah.

All of the above is out in the open. But there is another kind of subversion that is more subtle. This is the use of automated technology to leverage social media in order to create dissatisfaction and social division in society, to exacerbate existing divisions, and to create new ones. Some Democrats in America claim that Russian “bots,” stolen emails, and other ways of manipulating opinion through social media, tilted the election in the direction of Donald Trump. I doubt this, but there is documented evidence that fake Russian social media accounts pushed extremist points of view, both on the right and the left, apparently in order to increase social conflict by aggravating existing racial, cultural and class tensions.

This kind of psychological assault is highly dangerous. Like Mowry’s stickers the object is to turn various subgroups of the population against each other and to make them suspicious of each other’s loyalty. Extremists on both the progressive and conservative side push messages of distrust, for the government, the police, the military, business, the media, the educational system, and of course racial and religious groups. The ultimate goal is to split the country into quarreling pieces that will be easier to defeat than a unified nation.

Wasp was a great read. Mowry’s resourcefulness and humor were entertaining, and Russell’s understanding of the weaknesses of bureaucracies was instructive. I enjoyed watching the unsympathetic Sirian Empire lose a planet thanks to one clever man. But today, in the age of rampant terrorism and asymmetric warfare, when the “good guys” are on the other side from the Mowrys, Wasp is more of a warning than entertainment.

Posted in American society, Information war, Terrorism, War | 1 Comment

Ford vs. Kavanaugh

Posted on September 29, 2018 by Victor Rosenthal

I know I shouldn’t write about this. I haven’t been in the USA for four years, and that was Before Trump, when everything changed over there. I’m an old white male, which implies that I know less than nothing, especially about subjects like this.

But on the other hand, I don’t have a dog in this fight. The chances of me even going back there for a visit are close to zero. And while I am not a woman, I have a wife and daughters who are always ready to explain things to me. So yes, here is what I think about Kavanaugh/Ford.

First of all, and most important, it is absolutely true that women today still deal with a huge amount of harassment, undesired advances, and sexual assault of various kinds, including rape. It is out there, it happens, and women have to think about it and be prepared to protect themselves at all times. Yes, it sometimes happens to men as well, but with nowhere near the same frequency or severity.

It is true that, even today in the #MeToo era, women are often ignored or even punished when they report inappropriate behavior to employers, or when they report assaults to police. It is also true that often they do not report it because they are embarrassed, they think it will do no good, or they think they will get into trouble or be blamed. In many (most?) cases, they are right about this.

This has to change. It seems to me that it is changing in the US, finally, with such widely publicized events like the arrest of Harvey Weinstein and the conviction of Bill Cosby. I doubt this could have happened when I was growing up. Here in Israel, a surprising number of high ranking officers in the IDF and police have lost their jobs over sexual harassment of subordinates, and a president of the country went to prison for rape. Is the everyday experience of ordinary women changing? I don’t know, but I suspect that it is, little by little.

We are, in America and Israel, undergoing a sharp cultural change, and when this happens it’s possible to overcorrect.  In order to re-balance an unbalanced system, we can make changes that have unexpected, and undesired consequences. For example, some colleges and universities instituted policies for dealing with complaints of a sexual nature that did not provide due process for an accused to challenge an accusation, and which required a low standard of proof in order to punish an accused person, often by expulsion with a notation on the student’s or faculty member’s record that the reason was a sexual offense. Clearly such a punishment would have great impact, and should not be imposed lightly. That’s true for Supreme Court nominees too.

Here is another example: one of the slogans of the #MeToo movement is “Believe Survivors.” This is in response to the fact that victimized women are often not believed. But the formulation of the slogan itself implies that anyone who makes a complaint is a “survivor,” that is, a victim. Obviously it is possible for someone to make a complaint that is deliberately or accidentally false or exaggerated, or to identify the wrong person as the perpetrator. Perhaps that slogan should be reformulated as “Listen to complaints and take them seriously.” Although it is not as catchy as “Believe Survivors,” it more accurately describes the proper action to be taken in response to a complaint of sexual assault.

The injunction to believe someone making an accusation simply because she is a woman and women are often unfairly disbelieved is wrong. It contradicts the most basic principle of justice, which is that it must be impartial, neither biased toward the weak nor the strong, the rich nor the poor, or be swayed by the race, sex, religion or other characteristics of the litigants. Once this is violated, even if it is believed to be for a good reason, then there is no justice – only favoritism, corruption, identity politics, or whatever. The right thing to do is to listen to the accusation, take it seriously, and try as hard as possible to confirm or disprove it, regardless of who is accusing whom.

It also should be obvious that if a woman making an accusation of sexual misbehavior should be believed a priori, then the burden of proof falls on accused person, who must show that the accusation is false. This violates the principle of presumption of innocence, found in all Western legal codes and the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

As any policeman or prosecutor will tell you, the more time that elapses between the commission of a crime and its investigation, the harder it is to make a strong case. Physical evidence is lost, witnesses can’t be found, and memories fade and become distorted. The question of witnesses’ memories is extremely important. Everyone has had the experience of discussing past events with someone who was present at the time, and finding that – although you believed that you were absolutely correct about the details – your memories and the other person’s were significantly different. Sometimes one person remembers an event clearly while the other has absolutely no memory of what occurred. In one case, I was sure that I “remembered” an event at which I could not have been present; it turned out that my wife had described it to me. Memories are not reliable, even when you think they are.

The mechanism of human memory is very complicated; neuroscientists have developed numerous different models of how it works. One thing that is certain is that it is not like cinematography where a “film” of an event is created that accurately reflects the experience and can be played back in the future with no changes. First of all, the initial recording is affected by the person’s physical and emotional state at the time of the event, and the aspects of the experience that most captured the person’s attention. Second, the memory is processed and rationalized when it is saved in long-term memory. Choices are made, not necessarily consciously, if there are elements of the experience that don’t seem to fit. Third, long-term memories are recalled from time to time, sometimes just by the subject and sometimes when the subject tells someone else about it. Each time this happens there can be changes in detail or emphasis which modify the version of the memory that will be recalled the next time. The more time that passes, the more changes can occur.

For this reason, in a criminal trial the testimony of a witness, especially if the event happened long ago, needs to be corroborated, either by other witnesses or physical evidence. If the stakes are high – someone’s freedom, or their career – the uncorroborated testimony of a single witness is usually not enough to convict.

Another factor that is important in evaluating the testimony of a witness is whether the witness is disinterested. Does the witness stand to gain or lose financially or in some other way from his or her testimony? There doesn’t need to be a deliberate intent to mislead; people naturally tend to believe things that will provide them with benefits, either financial or – more to the point in this case – ideological.

Before continuing more specifically about the Kavanaugh/Ford affair, let me dispose of the objection that Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing isn’t a trial, it is, in the words of Roger Cohen, “just a job interview,” and needn’t observe niceties like the presumption of innocence. It is by all means a trial, even if it is an informal one held in a committee room and not in a court of law. It is a trial in the medieval sense, in which accusations are made, and the accused must defend himself or suffer the consequences. In this case, Kavanaugh’s reputation, his credibility, and his personal honor – not just as a jurist, but as a man – is in peril, as is his future in his profession. It isn’t as though he were applying for a job at some law firm and if they don’t like him he can go somewhere else. Because so much is at stake, it is imperative that the basic principles of impartiality and presumption of innocence must be observed.

Ford claims that Kavanaugh committed an act which, if it happened as described, would constitute serious sexual assault. There is no one who can testify that they witnessed the event except three people who were in the room; two of them say that they do not recall anything like it, and one (Ford) says that it happened as she described it. There is no physical evidence, and no one who even heard Ford talk about it until she discussed it in a counseling session in 2012. In other words, one witness with no corroborating evidence.

The alleged incident happened thirty-six years ago. Most of those who saw her testify [video] believe that something traumatic happened to her at a party (although she doesn’t remember where or precisely when). But what precisely happened? Everyone involved had been consuming alcohol. There is teenage horseplay (in which girls often participate) that doesn’t rise to the level of assault. Yes, what she described was definitely assault, but what if the actual event was something less than that, and over the years the severity of what she “remembered” was amplified?

She had many opportunities to “rewrite” this memory over thirty-six years, and it may have changed. She claims that she was absolutely sure that it was Kavanaugh, but she didn’t tell anyone until 2012. There have been numerous cases of misidentification that have sent people to prison or even to their deaths. Is a misidentification possible in this case? I think it is.

There is another thing to take into account. Ford is not disinterested in the outcome of this hearing. She is an anti-Trump Democrat. Could this have had some effect on her recollections? Perhaps over the years as she observed the progress of Kavanaugh’s career she developed an obsession about this man that she believed had traumatized her when they were teenagers? It’s possible.

I am not accusing her of making up the story and certainly not of deliberately doing it for ideological reasons. I am saying that there is a reasonable possibility that she could be mistaken, and there are psychological mechanisms that could explain it.  But the consequences of this for Kavanaugh are so great that the presumption of innocence should apply. He should not be severely punished based on one witness’s uncorroborated testimony about an event thirty-six years ago.

Kavanaugh has suffered greatly through this process and it seems to me that even if he is confirmed, his credibility and reputation have suffered a serious blow. Certainly if you ask anyone old enough to remember the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings what they think of Thomas, they will mention Anita Hill. In a larger sense, this latest “high-tech lynching,” to borrow Thomas’ words, was not as much about Christine Ford or Brett Kavanaugh. It was about getting Donald Trump, and paying the Republicans back for freezing the nomination of Merritt Garland.

But by far the most important reason for this circus is the massive elephant in the room: not Ford vs. Kavanaugh; rather, Roe vs. Wade.

Posted in American politics | 6 Comments

Puncturing the Palestinian Refugee Myth

Posted on September 28, 2018 by Victor Rosenthal

The World Bank says that the “economy” of the Gaza Strip is collapsing.

This is or should be about as shocking as the discovery that there is gambling at Rick’s café. The word “economy,” which implies at least some productivity, barely fits. Gaza has survived on UNRWA stipends that have supported 1.3 million people with Palestinian refugee status (out of a total population of 1.8 million), on payments from the Palestinian Authority (PA) to its tens of thousands of “employees” (who either do nothing or work for Hamas), and on other donations from Europe, the US, and the Arab world.

The World Bank notes that 70% of young people in Gaza are unemployed, and 54% of the population live below the poverty line (but next door to them live hundreds of Hamas-connected millionaires).

Now the cash spigot is being turned off. Some blame US President Trump, who has cut funds for the special Palestinian-only refugee agency UNRWA, but the underlying reason is the Malthusian fact that the international community can no longer afford to support a geometrically-increasing population of beggars.

The crisis will be discussed at a meeting this week of the “Ad Hoc Liaison Committee” of international donors and other interested parties under UN auspices and chaired by the Norwegian Foreign Minister. The bank “blamed a number of factors, including Israeli restrictions on goods and movement into Gaza and Palestinian Authority sanctions against the Hamas ruled enclave in an attempt to force Hamas to relinquish its authority there.”

Could there be a more blatant and absurd substitution of cause and effect?

Let’s look at the real reasons for the crisis. First there is the structural problem inherent in the “Palestinian Refugee” system set up almost 70 years ago, which guarantees an ever-increasing population of dependents who are kept that way on the chimerical assumption that someday they will “return” to “their homes” in what is today the Jewish state of Israel. They are both paid and educated to this end, and only this end.

Second, there is the political situation in Gaza, ruled by the internationally recognized terrorist organization, Hamas. Of the billions that the US and EU pump into Gaza via UNRWA, the PA, or directly, Hamas officials steal some for their personal use, and divert as much as they can of the rest into preparations for war with Israel, including digging very expensive tunnels which are shored up with concrete and iron imported for civilian purposes, and building rockets to fire at Israeli communities. Instead of working at the jobs that don’t exist, young Gazans participate in riots at the border fence with Israel, try to provoke IDF soldiers into shooting them, and launch incendiary devices into Israel.

Every few years they succeed in provoking a big enough reaction from Israel that whatever infrastructure they have left is severely damaged. Then they are given international aid to rebuild it, which promptly goes into more rockets and tunnels. This is repeated over and over.

The “Ad Hoc Liaison Committee” will doubtless propose new ways of providing aid, but it will not attack the fundamental causes of the problem. It will not propose doing away with UNRWA, abolishing refugee status for “refugees” that have never actually been displaced, resettling refugees in Arab countries, or educating them to aspire to independent lives in place of the dream that someday they will get revenge on the Jews. Neither will it propose replacing the corrupt, evil, Hamas regime. It will, almost certainly, blame Israel – the target of Hamas’ rockets and incendiary devices.

As a matter of fact, Israel is responsible to some extent, but not because it has malevolently strangled Gaza by its “blockade,” which is only an interdiction of militarily-useful goods and is permeable to food, medicine, and so forth. It is responsible – along with the rest of the world – for tolerating the unsustainable situation in Gaza. Israel finds it easier to continue with the status quo, even including the periodic wars to which it gives rise, than to deal with the nasty job of uprooting Hamas. It prefers that UNRWA continue to feed, house, and nurture the delusions of generations of Arabs than to deal with the chaos that would come from ending their dream of “return” once and for all.

This is cruel to both the Jews who are struck by the rockets and firebombs launched by Hamas, and to the Gazans who live under the thumb of the corrupt regime, and as “Palestinian refugees” are doomed to a life of statelessness and dependency.

It is ironic that the honored humanitarian experts of the world’s most humanitarian society ever, the European Union, leads this farce. It is ironic that recent American administrations and Israeli governments have all gone along with it, shouldering the lion’s share of the cost of the great Palestinian refugee scam.

But it is most ironic of all that it took an American president who is considered by those European sophisticates to be so beneath contempt that they would laugh at his General Assembly speech to begin the process of puncturing the sacrosanct Palestinian refugee myth; the same president who was supposedly too naïve to know that moving the American embassy to Jerusalem would “inevitably” lead to an explosion in the Arab world.

That explosion didn’t happen, and similarly there will be no explosion when UNRWA and the special status of “Palestinian refugees” are eliminated.

This may not be a sufficient condition for an end to the conflict between Israel and the Arabs, but it certainly is a necessary one!

Posted in Israel and Palestinian Arabs, Middle East politics, Terrorism, The UN | 3 Comments

Walking between the raindrops

Posted on September 24, 2018 by Victor Rosenthal

Last week, a Syrian-operated Russian antiaircraft system shot down a Russian plane while shooting at Israeli jets that had bombed a target in Syria. 15 Russians were on the plane, and none survived. That is really all I know about the incident itself.

Yesterday, the Russian Ministry of Defense blamed Israel, saying that Israel warned Russia only a minute before its attack on a building containing “systems to manufacture precision rockets for Iran and Hezbollah.” They said at one point that Israeli jets hid behind the Russian plane. They said that Israel misled the Russians about the location of the target. Israel denied the charges, and sent the commander of the IAF to Moscow on Thursday to present detailed technical information to the Russians.

Earlier in the week, Russian President Vladimir Putin had taken a softer line, saying that Israel was not to blame for the “chain of tragic circumstances.”

I am not in a position to say who’s right. One thing that’s clear is that the Syrians are totally incompetent, squirting missiles all over the sky, most likely after the Israeli planes were long gone. But nobody expects Arabs to be competent or to act like responsible grownups, so they are excused. It’s the “soft bigotry of low expectations.” And of course the opposite applies to Israel and the US (“the soft bigotry of high expectations?”) who are treated as all-powerful and responsible for everything that happens everywhere).

But the political implications of the event are significant. We think that Russia = Putin, but this is certainly not entirely true. While Putin has been surprisingly fair to Israel (for whatever reason), Russia is still Russia, and there are surely circles there which yearn for the old days when the Soviet Union was directly hostile to Israel (here is some interesting speculation about the depth of that hostility). And Putin is anything but transparent. We may enjoy his “friendship” today, but we cannot assume that it will continue tomorrow.

During the Cold War, Israel was “adopted” by the US, probably preferable to being adopted by the Soviets, but the fact that the Soviets adopted our enemies placed us in peril of becoming a proxy battlefield for the great powers. Today, the Russian-American rivalry is not as serious as it was then, but you can excuse us for being nervous.

Our good relationship vis-a-vis the US also cannot be taken for granted. President Donald Trump has been a better friend to Israel than many US presidents, particularly the last one. His administration finally ended the decades-long refusal to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, and to carry out the will of the Congress to move the US Embassy there. Perhaps even more important, it has deflated  the “Palestinian refugee” myth, which is probably the single most important factor that for 70 years has prevented any settlement – or even movement in the direction of a settlement – of our conflict with the Palestinians. Trump seems to be actually enforcing the Taylor Force Act, which calls for cutting funding to the Palestinian Authority as long as it continues paying terrorists and their families. His administration has re-imposed sanctions on Iran, effectively reversing the course of the previous administration, which – for reasons which are beyond my understanding – actually helped Iran finance world-wide terrorism, and which put into place a ‘deal’, against the wishes of the US Congress, that made a nuclear-armed Iran more likely.

American politics relating to this president have become so extreme, so polarized and polarizing, that even the previous paragraph – which I see as beyond dispute – provokes anger among the anti-Trump forces. But it’s still true. From the viewpoint of Israel, and I am thinking in the broadest possible sense, not from a right- or left-wing perspective, Trump has been great.

I was talking to a friend the other day, and we both agreed that it was strange that few observers seem to note the fragility of our relationship with the US. This fragility is partly due to the aforementioned madness – there is no other word – that characterizes the political scene in the US today. Trump will not be president for more than 6 years, and he may not be re-elected in 2020. He may even be hamstrung by an impeachment attempt if the Democrats take the House in the midterm election coming up in a little more than a month.

Imagine what will happen when the Democratic “Resistance” – the very word, evoking visions of partisans hiding in the forest and blowing up trains, shows the degree of polarization – comes to power, which of course it will at some point. Israel, formerly a non-partisan issue, has become (also thanks in part to the previous US president) just the opposite. Just as Trump reversed many of the decisions of his predecessor, his successor will act to reverse Trump. I can’t imagine a new president moving the embassy back to Tel Aviv, but certainly many of his decisions that affect Israel will be at risk.

Perhaps worse, the Democratic Party’s rising stars and most of their presidential hopefuls are more anti-Israel than ever before. Polls show that younger Democrats tend to be less pro-Israel than older ones, so time is not on our side. As my friend said, “if you thought Obama was bad, wait for President [put any possible candidate’s name here].” And a Democratic Congress would back the president up instead of checking him, as the Republican Congress did to Obama.

In the increasingly anti-Jewish and anti-Zionist world, Israel and her Jewish supporters are thought to be powerful and manipulative, controlling large nations and bending them to their will. In truth, tiny Israel must walk between the raindrops with the US and Russia in order to survive (Benjamin Netanyahu has been good at this, which is one of the reasons for his political survival). I think it’s hard for Americans or Canadians, who are insulated from an unstable world by two oceans, and who live in resource-rich nations that stretch between them, to fully grasp the insecurity that is Israel’s lot. This is one reason why Israelis have very little patience with North Americans telling them what’s good for them in matters relating to security.

Although we can’t predict the details of the future, one thing that is absolutely certain is that our relationships with the great powers will change; and the trends are such that it is not likely that the change will be for the better.

Sometimes it seems that Israeli politicians think, for example, that billions in US military aid will continue forever. They won’t. I guarantee it. We should start phasing it out now, instead of waiting for an anti-Israel president and Congress to do it for us.

Would you like to see more construction in Judea and Samaria? Now is the time.

I hate to always sound so belligerent, but if we are destined to have a war with Hamas, Hezbollah, and/or Iran, should we have it while Donald Trump is US President, or should we wait for, say, Cory Booker? Kamala Harris? Or even Michelle Obama?

We will always be walking between the raindrops, but we have good weather today. We should take advantage of it.

Posted in American politics, Middle East politics, US-Israel Relations, War | 2 Comments

Zionism and Ari Fuld

Posted on September 21, 2018 by Victor Rosenthal

I’ve been spending a great deal of time lately reflecting on the meaning and importance of Zionism. One reason is that I’m writing a book on the subject, but there is also the news. And this past week, the news included the atrocious murder of a dedicated Zionist, Ari Fuld.

People like to say that he was murdered because he was a Jew. That is only part of the story: he was murdered specifically because he was a Jew living in Eretz Israel. I’m sure his murderer hated Jews in general, but what really infuriates them is Jews living in the ancient homeland of the Jewish people.

I am not saying that Jew-haters wouldn’t murder Jews if there were no Jewish state. Obviously, they did so throughout the long period of exile. But the existence and flourishing of the state represents the victory of the Jews over their enemies, and the frustration of the desire to rid the world of our people drives Amalek and his friends wild, to the point that they will die themselves to achieve their aims.

Recently I read a dumb article by a smart guy, Anshel Pfeffer, who said that Zionism had ended 70 years ago with the founding of the state. “Despite the –ism in its name, Zionism was not an ideology, it was a program,” a program that was completed in 1948. You can’t be a Zionist any more, he said, although you can argue interminably about the shape and nature of the state.

He is obviously wrong. Zionism is both an ideology and a program, and while the program has changed over the years from establishing the state to protecting and preserving it, the ideology is still around, and is still hotly disputed both by Jews and others.

The minimal propositions of Zionist ideology are 1) that the preservation of the Jewish people is desirable, 2) that this requires the existence of a sovereign Jewish state, and 3) that the Jewish people have a historical, legal, and moral right to said state in Eretz Israel. You can add to these, but you can’t take anything away.

“Zionist” has become an ugly epithet in some quarters. Look it up in the Internet’s “Urban dictionary” and you’ll find that it refers to a “race supremacist, colonialist, extremist.” Ask Al Jazeera’s “Palestine Remix” propaganda generator and you find that Zionism is “A colonial movement supporting the establishment by any means necessary of a national state for Jews in historic Palestine.” UK Labour Party star Jeremy Corbyn famously said that “Zionists… don’t understand English irony.” And “Palestinian feminist” Linda Sarsour believes that it is impossible for someone to be both a Zionist and a feminist.

Zionism has nothing to do with race (or gender!), and the Jewish state came into being as an act of anti-colonialism, not the opposite. Needless to say – I wish it were truly needless – Zionism does not assert that Jews are superior to non-Jews, that Jews ought to dominate or exploit non-Jews, or that the religious concept of “chosen people” refers to anything other than the Jewish burden of observing the mitzvot of Torah. And believe me, Jews understand irony better than most folks.

The recently-created Palestinian people have an ideology and a program too. Their ideology derives from that of the 7th century Arab conquerors/bandits, and it states that Eretz Israel (and a whole lot of other places) belong to them in perpetuity, and that they have a right to occupy our land, take our property, kill our men, rape our women, and enslave our children. The program varies in detail depending on which Palestinian faction you ask, but it clearly conflicts with the Zionist program.

But the Palestinians are not the only ones opposed to the ideology of Zionism, although they are among the most honest about it. Some of the less honest anti-Zionists are to be found among American Reform Jews, who claim to be Zionists and to care about the preservation of the Jewish people and their state, but actually hold an ideology that denies fundamental aspects of Zionism.

The Reform ideology has matured since 1885, when the movement in America was founded. At that time, its platform was sharply anti-Zionist, stating “We consider ourselves no longer a nation, but a religious community, and therefore expect neither a return to Palestine, nor a sacrificial worship under the sons of Aaron, nor the restoration of any of the laws concerning the Jewish state.” Today’s platform pays lip service to their love and support for the State of Israel, but they have not significantly changed their ethical system based on “tikkun olam,” a Kabbalistic concept which they have redefined as a universalist, liberal, humanistic vision. Insofar as this system often places the welfare of other groups, including Palestinian Arabs, ahead of that of the Jewish people – and often even aligns the movement with the anti-Zionist Left – it contradicts the Zionist idea of protecting the Jewish people and their state.

In particular, Reform movement officials and rabbis often call for a “two-state solution” despite their lack of understanding the security concerns involved. Reform ideology and closeness to the political Left led directly to the creation of J Street, a supposedly Zionist lobbying group which has nevertheless systematically lobbied against the interests of the State of Israel, and the even more extreme “If Not Now” organization which puts on propaganda performances such as saying Kaddish for Palestinians killed in conflicts with Israel.

Ari Fuld was a traditional kind of hero, who saved at least one person’s life by chasing down and shooting the terrorist with his last ounce of strength. He was also a less dramatic sort of hero by devoting his life to activism on behalf of the Jewish state, and on behalf of its right to possess all of its historic homeland in Judea and Samaria. Ari, the son of a rabbi from Queens NY, came to Israel 27 years ago and served as a combat soldier in the IDF. In addition to tireless efforts as an advocate for Israel on social media and as a speaker, he worked for an organization that brought donated supplies to IDF soldiers wherever they were. He was liked and respected even by his political opponents.

Liberal American Jews were probably no less horrified by the brutal murder of Ari Fuld than Israelis (at least, insofar as they knew about it – coverage of Palestinian terrorism in foreign media is sparse and biased). But they should know that by legitimizing the terrorists in any way – by taking the position that the conflict is about Palestinian “rights,” by maintaining that the presence of Jewish communities across the Green line is illegitimate, by repeating the atrocity propaganda about Israel’s actions in self-defense, or by supporting organizations like the New Israel Fund that finance anti-Zionist causes – they are helping drive the terrorists’ knives into the backs of Jews like Ari Fuld.

Posted in American Jews, Terrorism, Zionism | Comments Off on Zionism and Ari Fuld

Twenty-five years after Oslo, the PLO is dying

Posted on September 16, 2018 by Victor Rosenthal

Ari Fuld, z”l

Almost exactly 25 years ago, on September 13, 1993, Israel committed the greatest single strategic mistake in its 70-year history by signing the “Declaration of Principles on Interim Self-Government Arrangements,” otherwise known as the Oslo I Accord.

The disaster of Oslo still reverberates today, when it claimed yet another of its thousands of Jewish and Arab victims with the murder of Ari Fuld, a Jewish father of four who was stabbed to death at Gush Etzion Junction, a site of numerous terror attacks, by a young man born in the years after Oslo and educated to be a human murder weapon by the educational system set up for that purpose by our Oslo partner Yasser Arafat.

One of the fascinating aspects of the Oslo saga is the fact that the 25 years of bloody war and terrorism that they have lived through since the festive signing ceremony on the White House Lawn has failed to convince some of its supporters that it was anything other than a good idea, albeit sabotaged by (among others) “settlers,” Benjamin Netanyahu, Yigal Amir, and today even Donald Trump.

Oslo allowed Arafat’s PLO, heretofore a banned terrorist organization, to assume the mantle of “legitimate representative of the Palestinian people,” return to Israel from its exile in Tunisia, and establish the Palestinian Authority (PA) to govern the Arabs of Judea, Samaria, and Gaza.

The fact is that Arafat never had the slightest desire to establish a peaceful state alongside Israel, or to join the New Middle East that Shimon Peres was wishfully dreaming about. He did not accept Israel’s right to exist and had no intention of changing the Palestinian Covenant which called for its violent elimination. And he certainly did not intend to “fight terrorism” – rather, he sponsored and encouraged it.

His goal was to make Israel unlivable by terrorism while at the same time applying diplomatic pressure for more and more concessions. Ultimately, he hoped to weaken the country spiritually, psychologically, and strategically, so that Israel’s enemies, the traditional Arab confrontation states and the PLO working together, could physically destroy her. With some modifications, he was following the so-called “Ten-Point Plan” adopted by the Palestinian National Council in 1974.

The most diabolical of his terrorist devices, which continues to murder Jews long after his own death, is the Palestinian Authority educational system, set up immediately upon the establishment of the PA. From their kindergartens through their universities, Palestinian children receive an indoctrination in the Palestinian narrative of victimization and revenge, as well as pure anti-Jewish hate. This is reinforced by official Palestinian media, which presents murderous terrorists as the heroes of the Palestinian people, and killing Jews and especially martyrdom in the process as the most honored act for a Palestinian.

Arafat had to manage the tension between appearing to cooperate with Israel and the Americans so that they would continue to provide money and weapons (to “fight terrorism”), and being an uncompromising warrior for his own people. This required little effort; indeed, the Israeli leadership was so blinded by its vision for peace that almost anything that Arafat did or said was rationalized.

When Arafat called for jihad in Arabic, it was explained as necessary for him to maintain the respect of “hard-liners.” The fact that then his people went out and engaged in the jihad he asked for was considered an unfortunate byproduct of the struggle for peace. Indeed, Yitzchak Rabin sometimes called terror victims “casualties of peace.” When Arafat made a speech in Johannesburg, South Africa in 1994 comparing the Oslo Accords to Mohammad’s treaty of Hudaybiyyah, in which he agreed to a temporary truce in order to gain time to build up his forces and then broke it to defeat his enemy, it was considered mere posturing. But he meant every word.

Many have asked the question, why did Israel not abrogate the Oslo accords and dismantle the PA after countless terror attacks, and after it had hard evidence that Arafat was sponsoring and encouraging terrorism and that weapons given by Israel to the PA were being used against Israeli civilians. One reason has always been American pressure; long after most Israelis realized that the PLO was not and would never be a partner for peace, American officials continued to believe the myth that the PLO wanted a state and would end the conflict if only Israel would make enough concessions.

But that wasn’t the only reason. In a very informative piece, Douglas Feith, who worked in the Reagan and Bush Administrations, argues that even when Israeli leaders realized that the “land for peace” deal would not happen because the PLO could not and would not end the conflict, they still continued to push for the deal because they believed that for demographic reasons, the territories were a poisoned meal that the country couldn’t digest. If a real peace deal couldn’t be obtained, then a unilateral withdrawal was the next best thing. One way or another, they wanted out of the territories. Even Ariel Sharon preferred to withdraw first and then worry about the security problems it created.

How Sharon would have managed what happened in Gaza after the unilateral withdrawal is something we will never know. We do know that his successor, Ehud Olmert tried to give away Judea and Samaria; only Mahmoud Abbas’ fears of making even a token concession to Israel, or perhaps his hopes of getting a better deal from the next US president and the UN, prevented a greater disaster than the flight from Gaza.

Unlike Olmert, Bibi has learned the lessons of Gaza and takes the security challenges seriously. And the Trump Administration’s Mideast team seems, for the first time, to be trying to develop a reality-based policy. In the past few weeks, the administration has sharply cut payments to the PA and UNRWA, the corrupt Palestinian refugee agency. It delivered a serious blow to the PLO’s honor by recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and moving the embassy, while not endorsing the Palestinian claim; and it closed the PLO’s “embassy” in Washington.

The PLO under Arafat and his successor, Abbas, has never changed its nature. From its founding as a terrorist militia in 1964, through its success as a Soviet client and its military adventures in Jordan and Lebanon, its exile to Tunisia in 1982, and its return in the guise of a legitimate authority in 1993, it has never been anything else than a weapon against the Jewish state. It has never offered anything to the Palestinians themselves except a chimerical hope of revenge.

Possibly, with the incipient end of the Abbas period and the new policy of the Trump Administration, we can finally say goodbye to the PLO – and the Arafat educational system.

The funeral for Ari Fuld will be starting in a few moments. May God avenge his blood, and make him the last victim of the hateful PLO.

Posted in 'Peace' Process, Israel and Palestinian Arabs | 2 Comments

Criticism or pathological hate?

Posted on September 14, 2018 by Victor Rosenthal

Hating Jews is a big topic of discussion these days. They’re talking about it in the UK, where Jeremy Corbyn can’t understand why so many are making such a big deal about what he sees as merely a principle of his proposed foreign policy. And they are talking about it in the USA, where 21% of American voters said they had at least a “somewhat favorable” impression of Louis Farrakhan (that was in March, and I would be surprised if the percentage wasn’t greater today).

I should note that I’m trying to stop using the word “antisemitism,” a word invented by 19th century German Jew-hater Wilhelm Marr to make his Judenhass more scientific-sounding. Marr also wanted to express his idea that the problem with Jews was more than just a religious, economic, or national issue: it was biological, racial. Of course this implies that Jewishness cannot be fixed. Even if a Jew got himself baptized, stopped being a money-lender, had German citizenship, or served with distinction in the German army, he was still corrupt and dangerous. We all know where this idea led.

Not using “antisemitism” also has the advantage of forestalling what I’ve called The World’s Stupidest Argument, the one that goes “Arabs can’t be antisemites because they are Semites.” No need to elaborate further on this one.

Jonathan Haidt, in his very illuminating book The Righteous Mind, tells us that the mind is like a rational rider on an emotional elephant. The rider has the ability to use linguistic reasoning to come to conclusions about the best way to proceed, and can nudge the elephant in his chosen direction. But ultimately, the elephant will go where he wants. Haidt argues that in most cases our emotions determine the positions we will take on moral, political, or religious issues, and that we try to justify them after the fact by logical reasoning. This is borne out by a consideration of Jew-hatred, which has had a mind-bendingly long line of pseudo-rational arguments adduced in its favor – everything from our failure to accept the true religion (anything but Judaism), to “racial” characteristics, to the countless Jewish conspiracy theories – but which seems to be at bottom irreducibly irrational.

Jew-hatred is found on all parts of the political spectrum, both right and left, although it is especially fecund at the extremes, where conspiratorial thinking is rife. Jews are seen as weak, cowardly, and corrupt, while at the same time enormously powerful. They are simultaneously held in contempt and feared. The accusation that Jews control the weather, which seems from the outside about as reasonable as the idea that the earth is flat, makes perfect sense to those who live inside the Jew-hating conceptual scheme.

What is most interesting about it is the way it seems to have a life of its own, mutating as societies and cultures change. During the Middle Ages in Europe, the religious aspect, blood libels, and various conspiracy theories about Jewish responsibility for plagues predominated. Later, when the causes of economic cycles proved to be as mysterious as the vector of the Black Plague, the Jews were accused of conspiring to manipulate them. Darwin’s discoveries were pressed into service as support for pseudo-scientific racial Jew-hatred, which enabled it to propagate even in “enlightened” cultures where religion was not an important factor. Jews have been accused of being behind every large-scale catastrophe, from world wars to 9/11.

The Holocaust interfered with the life cycle of the “organism” that is Jew-hatred. Although there were and are many who fully approved of Hitler’s project, and even wish that he had been able to complete it and rid the world of the Jewish menace at last, the sheer horror of the industrial techniques employed by the Nazis had a stunning impact. Certainly the emotional power of Jew-hatred was great, but opposed to it were images of piles of murdered babies, living skeletons, and piles of eyeglasses, hair, and gold teeth taken from humans that had been turned into smoke.

As a result, a strong counter-force against Jew-hatred came into being. In the West, at least, it became taboo to speak explicitly of hating Jews (or indeed any distinct group) or to advocate any kind of discrimination against them, because – well, because everyone knows where that leads. This doesn’t mean that nobody still harbored the old feelings, that Jews were economic parasites, sexual predators, conspirators, and even Christ-killers, but it was considered unacceptable to publically express these thoughts or to act on them.

But as always, the organism began to mutate. If it was no longer possible to express hatred for individuals, hating a country was still allowed (indeed, many governments encouraged hatred of rival countries). And unsurprisingly, one particular country has become the target for a hatred as popular, vicious and irrational as pre-Holocaust century Jew-hatred.

The pathological anti-Zionist, like the Jew-hater, will invent history and current events so as to “establish” that the Jewish state is illegitimate, evil, and should be extirpated from the land, which anti-Zionists believe was stolen from saintly Arabs by conniving, conspiratorial Je— er, Zionists. Like Jew-haters, who could be convinced that Jews committed ritual murder just on someone’s say-so, the Israel-haters have no trouble believing that IDF soldiers deliberately shoot at Arab children for fun, despite a total lack of evidence. The most ridiculous motives and impossible crimes are routinely attributed to Israel’s government and army, and are automatically believed by the legions of obsessive anti-Zionists.

Double standards for legitimacy, conformance to international law, treatment of minorities, and proportionality of actions taken in self-defense, are applied shamelessly by pathological anti-Zionists. Crimes like genocide, apartheid, and ethnic cleansing are falsely attributed to Israel, when these are precisely what would be done to Israel’s Jewish population if the remedies (like the “return” of Arab “refugees”) espoused by the anti-Zionists were adopted. The ideals of human rights and self-determination are strictly upheld for Palestinian Arabs, but ignored for Israel’s Jews. Any behavior is excused if it is called “resistance to occupation,” but Israel is held to the highest possible standards in self-defense.

The truth is that pathological anti-Zionism – as Fred Maroun, an Arab, says – “is a hatred worse than traditional anti-Semitism – it rivals Nazi-level anti-Semitism.”

Maroun argues, and I agree, that the question of whether anti-Zionism is antisemitism is not important. Analytically, they are different things, although very often the same people who fit one description also fit the other. But pathological anti-Zionism is a form of irrational bigotry that is no less evil and reprehensible than Jew-hatred, racism, homophobia, misogyny, or any similar moral aberration.

But it’s only “criticism of Israel,” say those like Jeremy Corbyn, who is as thoroughly suffused with the illness as the Munich terrorists that he honored with a wreath.

No. It’s simple to tell the difference. The easy acceptance of the false accusations, the double standards, the dehumanization of Israelis, and the association with those who express their hatred by acts of terrorism leave little room for error. It’s not criticism. Like old-fashioned Jew-hatred, it resembles demonic possession.

Posted in Jew Hatred | Comments Off on Criticism or pathological hate?

Upsetting the narrative

Posted on September 9, 2018 by Victor Rosenthal

Do you want to know what your enemies are thinking?

Listen to what they say. Usually they won’t tell you where and when the next terrorist attack will be but they will tell you their intentions and their strategy.

Even when they lie through their teeth, as Yasser Arafat was accustomed to do when speaking in English, the truth is discoverable. You just have to shut down the wishful thinking centers in your brain and listen to their words.

Mariam Barghouti is described as a “Palestinian American writer based in Ramallah.” In a recent article published in the Forward, she explained precisely how the concept of “Palestinian refugee” functions as an integral part of the Arab project to eliminate any Jewish sovereignty between the river and the sea and establish an Arab state in the place of Israel (h/t to Jim Wald):

Because of the Nakba, there is a part of Palestinian identity that is inherently linked with being a refugee. Those who fled the Nakba are banned from their cities of origin, their identities transformed and their past covered up under the signifiers of a new culture and language that is foreign, and hides what little remains of the past.

The Palestinian refugee story is the backbone of the Palestinian struggle. It is referenced in the poems we write and in the nostalgia that comes with exile, and it is the symbol of return to a life of dignity and belonging. [my emphasis]

There is much to learn from this. First, we see that although she mentions the pre-Zionist past, it’s clear that the specifically Palestinian part of her identity grows out of the Arab struggle against Jewish sovereignty that began about 100 years ago, and whose most poignant and definitional event was the nakba, the defeat in 1948, and the flight of many of the Arab residents from what would become Israel. The poems and nostalgia to which she refers are all connected to this defeat, in what contemporary Arab voices admitted would have been another Jewish bloodbath had they won.

The families of Arabs that fled before and during Israel’s War of Independence had lived in the land for various amounts of time. Some truly could trace their lineage back to the Arab conquest, others for several hundred years, and perhaps some were even descended from Jews that stayed in their ancestral home after the Roman destruction of Judea, and converted to Islam in the 7th century. But a large number were relatively recent immigrants from the surrounding countries, who migrated to Mandate Palestine because of economic opportunities offered by the British and Zionist development of the land.

Though defeated on the battlefield, the Arab nations were not prepared to end the struggle. In a stroke of strategic genius, they refused to agree to permit any solution for the Arab refugees other than return to the territory now occupied by the State of Israel. The strategy was then translated to a masterful tactical gambit: they convinced the Western nations that dominated the UN to create and place under Arab control an agency (UNRWA), paid for by a West guilt-ridden for its perceived crimes against both Jews and Arabs. UNRWA would not only feed, clothe, and house the refugees, but would guarantee the unlimited and open-ended growth of the refugee population and its indoctrination as a force to use against the Jewish state.

Unlike other UN agencies, UNRWA was designed to perpetuate the problem, not to solve it. To ensure the maximum number of refugees, UNRWA decided that anyone who could show that he or she had resided in the land for as little as two years prior to the war and left for any reason would be counted as a refugee; and to keep the population growing, that refugee status would be inherited in perpetuity.

Although in some cases children of non-Palestinian refugees can get “derivative” refugee status, it is not passed down further. And a non-Palestinian refugee who becomes a citizen of another country loses refugee status. But Palestinians in Judea and Samaria who had Jordanian citizenship were still considered refugees. When the Palestinian Authority was established, they remained refugees; and according to PA officials, even if a state of Palestine is established, they will still be stateless refugees (until they can “return to their homes” in Israel).

What Palestinian children learn in UNRWA schools is the narrative of expulsion and struggle, and that the only acceptable solution is “return” for the approximately 5.5 million people with Palestinian refugee status. As everyone knows, this is incompatible with the existence of a Jewish state.

This is why “the Palestinian refugee story is the backbone of the Palestinian struggle,” as Barghouti writes. The narrative that is taught to the descendants of the refugees blames the Jews for all Palestinian misfortunes, leaving out the fact that the Arab nations prevented the resettlement of the refugees after the war, as was done for the Jewish refugees from Arab nations, and continue to treat them like dirt. It focuses the resentment of the Palestinian Arabs on Israel, and defines the Palestinian identity in terms of opposition to Israel.

Importantly, the narrative does not allow for compromise. If the struggle to restore the refugees and their descendants to their “rightful” homes is essential to Palestinian identity, then denying them that return is denying them their identity. If you accept the narrative – and virtually all Palestinians do – then without complete victory, they are nothing, nobody.

I have argued and will continue to argue against those who insist that there is no Palestinian people, just a motley group of Arabs with no unique language, religion or culture. There is a Palestinian people, but it is not a remnant of ancient Canaanites. It is a group that has coalesced quite recently, perhaps as recently as the 1960s, when large numbers of Arabs began to self-identify as “Palestinians.” The Palestinian people was forged by the conflict with the Jews in the past 100 years, developing a unique culture different from that of Jordanians or Syrians, a culture in which – as Barghouti says – the story of the refugees is central.

What distinguishes Palestinian culture is its bottomless reservoir of resentment and hate for the Jews of Israel, a resentment so great and so pervasive that young children are encouraged to stone and stab Jews to death, and treated as heroes when they succeed in committing murder. It is a culture that doesn’t recognize any degree of responsibility for its problems, which are all attributed to others (Western colonialism, the Jews, Arab leaders, the US, and so on). This is not a healthy culture, and its narrative is anything but truthful.

But by cutting funding to UNRWA, the intended instrument of  Israel’s destruction, and by “stripping [the Palestinians] of their narrative,” as Barghouti says, Donald Trump is contributing to ending a historic injustice against both Israel and the Palestinian “refugees,” who have been denied the opportunity to create a real national identity by having the nakba narrative rammed down their throats.

If there will ever be a reconciliation between the Jews and Arabs in the region it can only happen with the replacement of the story of Palestinian victimization, along with the murderousness it engenders, with a true historical narrative.

***

To my readers: best wishes for a happy and healthy new year. Shana tova umetuka!

Posted in Israel and Palestinian Arabs | 3 Comments